Bauer Business Focus

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Bob Eury | Aug 19, 2016

Published on August 19, 2016

Bub Eury Photo by Brien Straw

On Bauer Business Focus – a conversation on residential development projects in downtown Houston.

Downtown District Executive Director Bob Eury stopped by Bauer Business Focus to discuss recent efforts to attract residents to the downtown Houston area, which has experienced viable growth over the past few years.

“It’s really becoming more of the whole live/work place that I think we’ve always had a vision of,” Eury said. “It’s a combination of residential coming in. It’s a combination of our hospitality meeting business just taking off at this point, along with a robust working environment.”

Eury also addressed the 2012 Downtown Living Initiative, which provided a tax break for developers who were looking to build residential areas downtown. While the initiative closed earlier this year, it has already resulted in over 3,700 new residential units in the area.

“The purpose of the program was we all knew that we needed more residential in downtown. We’d sort of run out of old buildings to convert. So it was a need to really be able to bridge the gap on new construction,” he said.

According to Eury, the ultimate goal is to create a robust area that takes after the downtown lifestyles of major cities like New York and Chicago.

“We’ve always used a target of a certain number of units we really need on the ground out there,” he added. “You’re probably talking about a population in the 20,000 range within the boundary. We won’t be that close to it in this round, but we’re certainly making a material advance toward that.”